Do you feel immortal? Chances are you did when you were born

According to a recent study led by Natalie Emmons of
Boston University, the tendency to reason in terms of an eternal
mind "is a universal cognitive default", regardless of race,
religion or culture. In other words, we all come into this life
believing we're immortal, with a large proportion of us never truly shaking the
belief off.

Emmons examined the development of prelife
reasoning in children to shed greater light on the sensation many
people have of owning a particular, ineffable and fundamental core,
which exists separate to the physical state, even if it can be
reasoned that these ideas are non-scientific and irrational. "I
study these things for a living but even find myself defaulting to
them. I know that my mind is a product of my brain but I still like
to think of myself as something independent of my body," said
Emmons.

"Our bias towards a belief of some kind
of existence prior to material embodiment emerges naturally in
early life"

Natalie Emmons, Boston
University

It is often said that these feelings emerge due
to the inculcation of religious beliefs -- that is, the idea of a
"soul", or other similar notions, arise from our understanding of
what constitutes a religious-based afterlife, whether we believe in
it or not -- or from cultural influences such as TV, films or
books.

However, Emmons hypothesised that perhaps this wasn't
a cultural phenomenon but was instead the result of intuition, in
much the same way a child intuitively "learns" to talk. To assess
this theory, Emmons focused on the concept of prelife, rather than
afterlife, as notions of prelife are largely left untouched by
religion: "Considering their absence from the vast majority of
Christian and Jewish faiths, which account for a third of the
world's religions, cultural scripts about prelife existence are not
as ubiquitous or pancultural as they are in the case of
afterlife."

Emmons studied 283 children from two distinct
cultures in Ecuador, which were then split into four sequential age
groups (five- to six-year-olds, seven- to eight-year-olds, nine- to
ten-year-olds, and eleven- to twelve year-olds) and examined for
any developmental changes in reasoning. The first group of children
were from an indigenous tribe who had no concept of a religious
"prelife" and were used to dealing with life and death owing to the
prominence of hunting and farming in their culture. The second
group were from an urban environment and exclusively Roman
Catholic.

"This work shows that it's possible for
science to study religious belief"

Deborah
Kelemen, Boston University

The examination included presenting the children
with drawings of a young woman, the same woman pregnant and a baby.
Emmons then asked the children to describe how they might have felt
if they imagined themselves existing prior to conception, in the
womb and as newborn babies, using the pictures as prompts. "By
being self-referential in nature the investigation was the ﬁrst to
systematically examine children's reasoning about their own, rather
than another's, capacities during a period detached from a
biological earthly body," the study reads.

Despite the disparate nature of the two groups,
Emmons discovered they both provided similar answers. The children
believed that whilst they had no physical manifestation before
birth, they could nonetheless still think, and feel emotions. This
led Emmons to conclude that our bias towards a belief of some kind
of existence prior to material embodiment emerges naturally in
early life, with mentality -- such as feelings and emotions --
taking precedence over bodily attributes.

"This work shows that it's possible for science
to study religious belief," said Deborah Kelemen, an Associate
Professor of Psychology at Boston University and co-author of the
paper. "At the same time, it helps us understand some universal
aspects of human cognition and the structure of the
mind."

The necessity for having evolved this apparently
universal technique of believing in a form of eternal life is not
entirely clear, with Emmons postulating it might be a by-product of
our highly developed social reasoning: "We're really good at
figuring out what people are thinking, what their emotions are,
what their desires are". However, the fallout of this
developed sense of reasoning is to sometimes find patterns and
connections where there are none, such as seeing faces in inannimate objects, believing there is "puprose" to
the universive, or in this instance, believing in eternal
souls.